Jordan Crane

For almost three decades, master cartoonist Jordan Crane has put together a body of short stories that garnered him multiple Eisner and Ignatz Award nominations, via the pages of his comic book series Uptight and the influential comics anthology, Non. Yet they have never been collected until now. Featuring over a dozen short stories (spanning multiple genres) published over the past 25 years, Goes Like This is a gorgeously packaged anthology (including varying paper stocks and rounded corners) of Crane's work. "The Hand of Gold" is a short but grim Weird Western, a morality play in which an accidental crime leads a criminal to a supernatural maximum security cell. "Below the Shade of Night" presents an anxiety that is rooted in the follies and ignorance of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. "Vicissitude" maps uncharted territory of graphic melancholia via a tale of infidelity. "Trash Night" depicts the troubled relationship of Dee and Leo, with mounting tension and mistrust that reaches a boiling point. In "The Dark Nothing," a rare foray into science fiction, the three-person crew of prospecting ship Sagasu 17 attempt to harvest an asteroid, and things go horribly awry. "The Middle Nowhere" begins with a man waiting in a small shack. All around him is a black sand desert. The wind rises, the rain comes, and it just might be the end of everything he's known. Also featuring additional prints and drawings from the author's archives, Goes Like This is a tantalizing sampler of one of the most brilliant cartoonists working today.

A young couple is stuck in traffic, reading a book aloud to each other to pass the time. The relationship is already strained, but between the encroaching road rage, and a novel that hits way too close to home, tensions are running especially high by the time they arrive back at their apartment. When one of them leaves to get takeout and a movie, each of the young lovers is individually forced to confront loss, grief, fear, and insecurities in unexpected and shocking ways. Crane's formal use of the comics medium -- threading several timelines and the interior and exterior lives of its protagonists together to create an increasing, almost Hitchcockian sense of dread and paranoia -- is masterful. But as the title hints, there are dualities at its core that make it one of the most exciting works of graphic literary fiction in recent memory, a brilliant adult drama that showcases a deep empathy and compassion for its characters as well as a visually arresting showcase of Crane's considerable talents. Keeping Two is ostensibly a story about loss, but by the end, it just might also be about finding something along the way -- something that had seemed irredeemable up to that point. In that way, it's also a deeply romantic book. Cartoonist Jordan Crane has been one of the most quietly influential comics-makers of the past quarter-century - in multiple senses of the word: as a cartoonist, a designer, an editor, a publisher, a printmaker, an advocate, an archivist, and more. But Keeping Two is his biggest project in close to two decades and will be one of the most anticipated graphic novels of 2022.

? "This far-reaching metaphysical outing, an addition to Toon’s early reader comics series, focuses on the microscopic and the immense as well as individuality and collectivity. With abstract, psychedelic art, Crane introduces a white, moonlike orb that grows arms and emerges from the darkness after a page turn: “I am one.” The being next appears—smiling, with its arms outstretched—within the chest of a second, long-limbed figure. As the book moves along, the book shows this being as a part of an interconnected whole that comprises the planet and its fundamental materials (“made of air/ and of cloud/ made of water/ and of earth/ and seed”) until the materials become flesh (“of leaf and fruit/ and bug and bee/ and bone and meat”). As the book zooms into the biological, readers glimpse the inside of a neon pink bird’s stomach and the ventricles of a beating heart, and atoms are rendered as dramatic, kaleidoscopic forms. Finally, as the book zooms back out, long-limbed beings join the first figure, all with similar orbs that grow from their chests, connecting and pooling together: “We are all one.” This is a strange and lovely meditation on wholeness."—Publishers Weekly, starred reviewA poetic and lyrical picture book, bursting with colors, about our interdependent world, from cell to self and seed to sky. "With bright artwork and a spare, poetic text, this inviting comic for little ones takes on a truly gigantic topic: the interconnectedness of the universe... It’s eye-catching stuff, and the tone of the text is general enough that, if the concept soars over the heads of little ones, they’ll still be able to grasp the overall message, which is warm, encouraging, and hopeful."--Booklist

In this 80-page volume, Jordan Crane draws us in with two gripping and wrenching stories, one of the mundane, and the other of the fantastic. First, there is "Keeping Two." William's girlfriend goes missing during a trip to the supermarket, and he must look down the long dark narrow tunnel that his life will become without her. He is reading a book, but the book doesn't help, and indeed feeds his anxieties, rendering his loss in starkly contrasting lines. The second story, "Discovering the Dark," is 26 pages and drawn with two colors. Akihiro Akaike is employed as a repairman aboard an asteroid mining ship in the year 2033. In his spare time, he is an amateur astrophysicist, and a discovery he makes drives him steal supplies and a company ship in order to make a clandestine 7-month voyage. However, when the mining operation discovers his plans, he is forced into a rapidly deteriorating set of probabilities.

This flexi-journal features the unique artwork of acclaimed silkscreen artist Jordan Crane.

From the editor of the acclaimed comics anthology NON comes this beautiful, emotive "Picto-Novella." Largely wordless and cunningly rendered, this little book is sure to touch most folks. In The Last Lonely Saturday, an older man sits at his kitchen table, filled with melancholy. Dishes are piled up in the sink, a full pot of coffee burns on the counter; it’s a quiet scene of existential despair. It quickly becomes clear that the man is a widower, and today is the day to visit his departed wife’s gravesite. Little does he know that what the day holds for him will result in this being his last lonely Saturday.